What I learned on the way to benching 350 pounds

Continuing the series that, at this rate, is set to finish up in about 15 years, here is the third installment, and currently the first of three installments about the bench press.

Just to recap what this whole thing is about – since a lot of you weren’t following my blog the last time I did an installment (in January) – I’m giving an overview of the things I had to learn to hit milestones in each lift (50 pound increments for the bench, 100 pound increments for the squat and pull), and as the series progresses I’ll talk about how my training has evolved over time to avoid/break plateaus and keep making progress.

So, without further ado…

1. Practice the pattern

I was a pretty good bencher the first time I tried. The main reason was that I had always done a TON of pushups. When I started playing football in 3rd grade, I asked my coach how I could get stronger. He told me to do pushups. So I did. Every day for the next 3 years. I’d do as many as I could in the morning, after school, and at night. When my parents got me a weight set for my birthday in 6th grade, the first thing I did was max on bench press (I was a bro from the start 🙂 ). I got 150, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of bodyweight. I didn’t lift weights very often at first because I was playing sports essentially year-round (and was told never to lift weights in season), so fast forward another 3 years of essentially only doing pushups, and by my freshman year in high school I was benching 275 with very little time spent under the bar.

This basically mirrored my experience with the deadlift, which was strong from the start because of practice with the pattern from a young age, as compared to my squat, which was an uphill battle for a long time. I’ve seen this with essentially all my friends who have joined the armed forces as well. In spite of sleeping very little, running and marching all the time, and doing enough pushups and pullups to make the most people cry “over-training,” they almost invariably come back from basic with bigger bench presses than they left with from doing bazillions of pushups.

This is a principle that can be applied to almost anyone, regardless of training age. If I find myself in a rut with my squat or bench, I’ll spend several weeks doing a few hundred bodyweight squats or pushups a day, and the increased work capacity, combined with the neural effect of greasing the groove, almost always pays off for me.

2. Train the triceps

I heard bench was all about the pecs when I first started lifting. That was the common wisdom in the YMCA weightroom and the school gym. However, when I met Travis Mash and he told me about Westside, I learned about how important the triceps are. Now, looking back it seems obvious because the bench press requires you to extend your arms, but it was pretty revolutionary to a 14 year old. Not much more to add to this point, and in those early days I probably took things a bit to far by over-emphasizing my triceps and neglecting my chest (just like the shirted benchers who taught me how to bench), but it is erroneous to think of the bench press as purely a chest exercise.

3. Get comfortable with heavy weight in your hands

When I first started training, I used bands and chains all the time (because I cut my teeth on westside). I’m less sold now on bands and chains being superior to straight weight for raw lifters, but I do think they have one big advantage: they let you feel heavier weight in your hands and move it through a full ROM.

Everyone who’s spotted for someone benching heavy weight knows what the “oh crap” face looks like. You lift out a weight to them for a PR attempt, and as soon as they feel it in their hands their eyes bulge, they look like a deer in headlights, and you know they have no chance of completing the lift. Using bands and chains (and nowadays things like the Mark Bell’s Slingshot or the Titan Ram) lets you feel supermaximal weights in your hands while still moving the bar through a full ROM, so that when you attempt a new max, the weight at least feels manageable in your hands and you have a fighting chance.When I was starting out, I used bands and chains all the time, so even when I missed lifts I found out the weight was too much when I couldn’t grind it to lockout, not when I got a liftoff.

4. Don’t fixate on numbers.

I had a bad mental block with 315. I’d hit 310 in either a meet or in training probably a dozen times, but when I got 3 wheels on the bar I would literally be unable to budge it off my chest. All my other bench press variations were going up (remember, I was training Westside style, so I was rotating through several different bench variations), but my plain old competition-style bench press was staying put. My training partner at the time, Lavan, fixed this one day by telling me I couldn’t look at the bar during my workout. Between sets I had to sit up and face away from the bar, and he’d load the weight for me. He made sure to use an odd assortment of 10s and 5s so that after 2 or 3 sets, I honestly had no idea how much weight was on the bar. I ended up benching 330 that day before I finally missed 335. When I finally missed and was allowed to look at the bar, I was both relieved I’d crossed that barrier, and pissed at myself because I had obviously been capable of doing so for quite some time.If a number is screwing with you, having a training partner do something like that for you might just be the ticket to a new PR and fresh gains once you get past the mental barrier.

5. Train with volume

I always loved benching with a TON of volume. I’d do the normal 9×3 Westside speed work one day, then work up to a max, then drop back for a burnout set or two, then do a DB press pyramid accumulating 80ish reps over 6-8 sets, then direct triceps work, and 8 sets of rows and 8 sets pullups or pulldowns. On my other bench day, I’d work up to a max single or triple on some bench press variation, then strip some weight off the bar and do 8 sets of 5, followed by the same basic accessories from the other bench day.By no means do I think what I just described was optimal, but for bench I’ve always found that erring on the side of too much was better than erring on the side of too little (ditto with squat, opposite for deadlift). If nothing else, it builds the work capacity to help you adapt and supercompensate when you take up a more sane training program or taper for a meet.Now, enjoy this video of a bunch of people who all bench substantially more than I do:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PuRHNpxUfU]

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About Greg Nuckols

Greg Nuckols has over a decade of experience under the bar, and a BS in Exercise and Sports Science. He’s held 3 all-time world records in powerlifting in the 220 and 242 classes.

He’s trained hundreds of athletes and regular folks, both online and in-person. He’s written for many of the major magazines and websites in the fitness industry, including Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, Bodybuilding.com, T-Nation, and Schwarzenegger.com. Furthermore, he’s had the opportunity to work with and learn from numerous record holders, champion athletes, and collegiate and professional strength and conditioning coaches through his previous job as Chief Content Director for Juggernaut Training Systems and current full-time work here on Stronger By Science.

His passions are making complex information easily understandable for athletes, coaches, and fitness enthusiasts, helping people reach their strength and fitness goals, and drinking great beer.

Due to my bare-bones home gym, I’m doing an experiment with my bench. Basically all I’ve done/am doing for 12 weeks is floor press and overhead press, rotating the reps on the Cube Method for main work and doing sets of 5-8 for assistance work. I’ll test my bench (long stalled in the 260-275 neighborhood) in 2 weeks and see what’s happened. Ultimately, the actual bench # doesn’t matter much since there’s no bench in strongman, but it’ll be interesting nonetheless and I do need to get my triceps/shoulders stronger.

This week was the 10th week and 3rd cycle of the Cube method since I moved into my garage gym full time. My upper body lifts for the last 10 weeks have been strict/push press, floor press, or reverse band floor press. Reverse band floor press might seem like a weird thing and I don’t know if anyone else really does it, but I was getting bored just hammering away with regular floor press, so this added in some variety and got me using some heavier weights. I think I was doing 250 for sets of 8 on reverse band compared to 250 for 1 for regular floor press. Basically just a shit ton of triceps work.

Bench test day today, went in to my university gym, and hit a super easy 255×1, 275×1, then 290×1 for a 15 pound PR. I also hit a PR of 225×9 on bench despite basically forgetting to use leg drive for the first 3 reps. I weight about 185, so that puts me at 1.56BW. My bench has been stalled for quite a while, as I said, so to have it move at all was pretty great. Bench doesn’t matter so much for strongman, but more what I learned from this was

1: Triceps!

2: Focusing on 2-3 exercises will likely benefit me more than a rotation of, to use deadlift as an example: conventional, against bands, RDL, rack pull, sumo, and farmers/side-handle deadlifts. So I’m trying to adopt this strategy toward more of my lifts.

I’m not sure if this is useful for anyone with +mediocre numbers, but I’ll take the PR.

I have a question about your time training westside, You show your bench day setup, i just want to know what your lower day setup was like? And did you just do 4 days a week? Thanks a lot im considering training westside and would love any advice you have for it

It was pretty vanilla westside, really. 2 max effort, 2 dynamic effort sessions per week, lots of lat, triceps, hamstrings, and core work, some added accessory work in smaller workouts, etc. If you re-read some of the older articles on the westside site, that’s pretty much exactly what I was doing, except going a little heavier (as long as I could maintain speed fairly well) on DE day.